


Born Clumsy

by asparagusmama



Series: Tales of the companions [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dyspraxia, Exploring, Gen, Grief, Peace, families come in all shapes, post Rosa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 16:55:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagusmama/pseuds/asparagusmama
Summary: Ryan discovered the Cloister room while exploring the TARDIS on sleepless nights and finds some peace.





	Born Clumsy

It was on the eighth day Ryan found the place in the TARDIS. The heart of the TARDIS, he liked to think, but he had no idea. Rooms and corridors went on and on forever. They started off matching the console room design, all weird Gothic metal and pink, then turned white further away, lined with large white indentations that Ryan decided were called roundels, and then, even further away, it was like walking through an old school or hospital, one not retrofitted back in the noughties, like most places had been, like picture of the old maternity home his Nan first worked in – bare magnolia walls, pale grey concrete floors and echoing metal stairs. He started exploring on the second day they were in the TARDIS, when he realised getting back to Sheffield in his own time was not going to be as straight forward as the Doctor still liked to imply. They'd made it back once, in the early industrialisation of the Victorian era, and being black in the 1820s had been an eye-opener – less prejudice and more naked curiosity than he could have imagined. Some people assumed he was a freed slave, most just assumed he had come to work in the textile mills or the steel works, just like every other man and boy there, most coming from the countryside around about, but some from all over the country and empire.

He'd found a field of butterflies on his first exploration, and since then he'd found a huge swimming pool surrounded by Roman statues in gold, a room with a climbing wall, another will an actual rock face, a room full of books which looked like a posh library, and guessed it probably was, another just filled with bolts of all sizes, shapes, and metals, piled high, all the way up to the ceiling, one filled with all kinds of cricket memorabilia, and a room that looked like a medieval church but filled with what looked famous old masters. A couple of times he'd see cats stalking the corridors, but he'd not been sleeping well, and decided he might have been seeing things.

He began to go to this quiet place every night once he'd found it, after every wrong planet, every wrong time, after every adventure of running and shouting and people getting the wrong idea about them. After every time he let everyone down again by his dropping something, or falling over, or saying the wrong thing, or getting violent, thinking he was defending them, but only succeeding in getting lectured by the Doctor. Every time he looked at Graham's lack of disappointment and instead encouragement and saw also the loss of his Nan reflected in his eyes, and yet again he could not bring himself to accept the hug or the fist bump or the high five he felt ba, but he absolutely could not bring himself to say 'granddad', even though he did not really remember his own and didn't need a dad, his father had made that obvious.

He was shamed. He didn't like to admit it. So shamed to call that pasty-faced old white dude granddad. He barely remembered his own granddad, either of them, and his own dad wasn't there for him, yet for the last few years Graham had been there, always encouraging, when he didn't get the GCSEs and had to retake them, when the local college wanted him to do one of those taster classes for the stupid. Well, the learning disabled. Ryan could think of another word or two, but the disappointment in Graham's eyes and his Nan's, while she gave him a clip round the ear, would be enough to even stop the thoughts. He had thought he was beginning to find his place, even if he felt like a slow starter among his old school mates. “You have plenty of time mate, we're not going anywhere, we'll support you,” Graham had said.

And instead of being grateful, Ryan had resented him. Some bloke, some white bloke, coming taking his Nan from him. He wasn't his granddad, he couldn't remember his granddad. Sometimes he felt like he was forgetting his Mum. He couldn't forget his Nan.

It was nice in this room. He liked it. He felt at peace. Old Roman style pillars covered in trailing ivy, a pond with goldfish in the centre, with the soothing sound of trickling water from the waterfall features that fed it. Weirdly, there was even a gentle breeze that stirred the leaved and smelt of flowers.

After day twenty, after fifteen adventures, he came to the room yet again. He should call Graham grandad, he thought. He should. After Graham's lack of shame, after his anger and shaking desire to protect him, after that racist dick slapped him. He really should.

Plenty of other people back at home had white grandparents. Parents even. It was no big deal. Unlike back there.

At home it meant nothing. Well to most people. Some racist dicks at home too. Law wasn't on their side though, was it. Yaz would point that out to him. And she did. She had.

More judgemental dicks to laugh at him fall over his feet or drop the shopping!

He was a fucking liability.

Would they get home?

“Hello,” the Doctor said softly, sitting next to him on the stone bench. “It's peaceful here, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Ryan replied, shrugging.

The sat in silence, a weighted silence, it seemed like the Doctor was waiting.

“I'm a liability!” Ryan finally burst out.

The Doctor said nothing.

“I am. I can't ride a bike. I can't catch a ball. Every time we have to run, I fall over, someone has to go back for me. I'm so slow at climbing ladders and that. I slow everyone down. I'm going to get us killed one day soon if we don't get back home, I swear!”

“No you won't. You're brilliant, you are. Don't let anyone tell you different.”

“I'm so thick, I didn't even know who Rosa Parks was, not properly. I was a liability. There, wasn't I?”

“No. Never. Look Ryan, I should have thought...”

“I've been called names, I get stopped by the police more than my white mates, sometimes in shopping malls the security guard is gonna follow me. Nan talked about growing up in the seventies, when the National Front had marches, people were scared at times, and there was nasty graffiti about. But it's not like that, not like...” Ryan paused to take a centring breath, and went on angrily,

“It didn't matter what I said, who I was, I was scum to those people. Sub-human. Total scum. Do you know what that felt like sitting at the back of the bus like that, while you all – even Yaz! - were at the front! Back home now, if anyone is gonna get real racist shit, it might be Yaz, not me. EDL came up to Sheffield after the referendum you know, hung outside the mosque yelling all kinds of hate. Saying all kinds of lies about Muslims. Then the Polish shop on the corner of our street got firebombed soon after. All that is sick, nasty, makes you feel sick and scared, but the bastards are breaking the law. There... there...”

“Yet Yaz is a police officer,” the Doctor said. “I'm sorry, as soon as I realised, I should have risked everything and got you back to the TARDIS, but then I had to protect her too...”

“No, I get that Doctor, I do. If that bastard had got hold of the TARDIS, I'd have been stuck there for life, not two days, don't apologise. And like you say, Yaz is a fed. Everything is different, better...” but Ryan didn't sound convinced, he sounded bitter, angry, sad.

“It is different. The same and different. I was there at one of William Wilberforce's speeches, with my Granddaughter. She was so inspired, so was I. You could challenge injustice and oppression peacefully. I had time then, we stayed. People back then , they boycotted sugar, thousands of British people did, sugar and cotton, for decades after they'd abolished slavery in the Empire,” the Doctor spat out the word 'empire' with disgust and contempt. “I've seen all kinds of prejudice, been places where no one notices colour of the human, where the humans just treat all aliens with contempt and prejudice; where the white humans are the ones at a disadvantage, where I had to struggle harder to be listened to, where the African and Asian descended ones had all the wealth and advantage and large numbers of the whites lived in slums literally at the end of the solar system, on Pluto. It doesn't remain, it changes. But hatred is hatred. The American civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties was a fixed point, and important point. All I could do was make sure Rosa still stayed sitting on that seat. I had to sit there Ryan – your Gra – Graham had to stand there and be the reason Rosa sat. It didn't sit easily with him, I can tell you. I'm a Time Lord, so I felt Time coalesce around us, crystallise and fix and stay on track all Graham could do was stand there and think of his wife and feel ashamed.”

“My Nan. Graham is never ashamed of me, however awkward or thick or clumsy I am. He shouldn't have to...” Ryan dashed away a tear angrily.

The Doctor put her hand over Ryan's' shoulder and squeezed gently. “You are not clumsy, you are not thick, and you are not a liability. Let me tell you I was so proud of you, you did something I think that inspired Rosa Parks, I saw the way she looked at you as she was led away by the police. And you did something I could never do, keeping your head down and keeping yourself safe when you literally were walking with a target on your back. Once, when a friend of mine, Bill, and I, were in another time less enlightened, I said to her, gave her a little lecture about keeping her head down and behaving, we were just on a fact finding mission to see how much the human knew about the alien creature, to just observe the social niceties of the time. And she did, despite the colour of her giving her a target. But the minute the man referred to her by not a nice name and wanted her out of his drawing room, I lost it and punched him in the face, and delayed finding out what we needed by hours! I'm no good at staying invisible to keep myself safe, I really can't. You did, and I appreciate how hard it must have been for you.”

Ryan nodded, smiling wryly, and stood up. “I think I'm going to find Gr- my Granddad and give him a hug.”

The Doctor smiled back and nodded.


End file.
